Moonchild's Introspection
by Jiltanith
Summary: See title.


Warnings: Spoilers for movie  
Author note: written for sticknstrings round 2 (on insanejournal)  
Prompt: Moonchild by Iron Maiden (very loosely inspired by.)

Disclaimer: Star Trek is not mine. Darn.

_... Moonchild: a child born in space rather than on a planetary surface. When the term first came into use in the 22nd century it was applied to children born on Earth's moon, but as the off-Earth population grew to the point that fewer children were born on Earth itself than in colonies on other planets and satellites, it came to signify a child born on a space-going vessel. Modern examples include Starfleet's James T. Kirk ..._

James Tiberius Kirk was a happy man.

People thought he'd gone into Starfleet as just another way to rebel, or "because he thought he was meant for something better", or as a way to get away from the trouble he'd made for himself in Iowa, or even just to have another chance at that truly _fine_ Cadet Uhura. And it was true he'd been marking time for a while, and bored. However, it certainly hadn't been to get away from trouble. His lawyers were pretty damn good at getting him out of trouble. No, the real reason was that he'd needed a new challenge.

Back in his early teens, when he'd borrowed his step-father's antique sports car and managed to drop it into Fuller's Canyon, he hadn't argued about being punished by losing his allowance until the car was paid for ... even though the car was worth a small fortune, and his allowance was the normal from parents trying to teach their kids to be frugal. It was only fair; if you break something, you buy it, of course.

On the other hand, being stuck without money for the foreseeable future wasn't an acceptable prospect. So he'd started applying that "genius-level" mind to the problem, studied ways to make money (legally, of course, because A, doing things illegally meant that you weren't good enough to do it without cheating, and B, he was already on probation from the car thing). He'd taken the small savings he'd been building up for a speed bike and started playing the stock market. When he'd built a bit of a cushion on fairly safe investments, he'd branched out into venture capital, patented a couple of ideas he'd thought of as refinements of things they used on the farm and licensed them to a couple of the companies he'd funded, and pretty soon he'd not only been able to replace the car, he was the youngest multi-millionaire since some kid in the 20th Century. Not that that was widely known, or even a matter of public record. People got weird when they knew you had enough money to buy the business they worked for and shut it down if you felt like it . . . and he had a reputation as a slacker to protect.

But it still meant that he had a staff looking after everything, so it really hadn't taken much to hand things off after he'd decided to take Pike's dare. Business was getting dull anyway and the money had reached the point where it was self-sustaining. There was no point in playing that game anymore.

The Academy had been a challenge. He'd been able to skip some things because of the advanced credits he'd earned while he was waiting to put in enough time in the school system, so finishing in three years really hadn't been much of a stretch. He didn't have business meetings to worry about any more, and he'd resigned from active management of the charities he'd started. But he wasn't the only really smart one anymore, he finally had real competition. He'd had some advantages just from being 22 when he'd started . . . but there were people like that Chekov kid (who was now one of his bridge crew, and wasn't _that _a kick) who'd already graduated even though he was only 17, and Bones, and Uhura . . . Of course, there were also people like Cadet "Cupcake". He didn't hold a grudge against "Cupcake" for the beating he'd taken (he'd pretty much asked for it, and really, he'd been at that bar in the first place because he was looking for something of the sort), but he wasn't going to let "Cupcake" know that. It'd be good for him to worry about whether his new Captain was holding those bruises against him.

Yes, the Academy had been a true challenge in ways he hadn't had to deal with since his mom had taken him and his older brother George to Tarsus IV to visit family, right before the food supply had been contaminated by fungus. He'd managed to apply some of the principles of his patented agricultural inventions to salvage some of the food; enough that Governor Kodos had delayed his purges. When the resupply ships arrived ahead of schedule, twelve hours before the executions began, Kodos had been removed from office and reprimanded, but the only deaths had been of those who ate the contaminated food before the problem was discovered.

The Kobayashi Maru scenario had been another challenge. He really didn't believe in a no-win situation; although he'd realized that Pike had been correct about that sometimes depending on the definition of "win" (and it had definitely been an epiphany when he realized that his father _had_ won, even though the price of winning had been his own life). And he'd have to have a discussion with Commander Spock about why Spock thought his dad had lost! In retrospect, he could've been a bit more subtle in his add-on . . . but he hadn't cheated. Not really. If it was legal for one side to manipulate the odds to assure a win, then it had to be legal for the other side to do the same thing. All he'd really needed was access . . .

Hell, even finding out Uhura's first name had been a challenge, and he'd settle for finding out because Spock slipped. It wasn't the first challenge he'd overcome by the "whatever works" method.

Now he had the biggest challenge he'd ever had in his life, commanding a starship with a crew of hundreds, when he didn't have any Fleet experience beyond what he'd learned in the Academy of being crew. Some of the older crew would have trouble with the idea of someone so young, with so little experience, in command. (Not that he was quite as inexperienced as they thought. He had, after all, been a "Captain of Industry" long before he'd ever thought of going into the Academy, which meant command experience, political experience, and even war experience. He also had the things he'd picked up from that mind-meld with Spock-the-Alternate, who had melded with the alternate him more than once.) He'd make mistakes, of course; he would've made mistakes even if he'd come to the command in the standard way. But he had brains, guts, flair, and Commander Spock on his side, this time. He had exactly what he needed, the kind of challenge that wouldn't get old and would bring him new experiences often. He was pretty sure that it would last the rest of his life.

Amend that. James Tiberius Kirk wasn't just a happy man, he was a very happy man.

End.

The idea of the young Kirk needing to pay for that destroyed antique car came from terrie01's Inner Demons. And the idea of Winona Kirk taking her sons to Tarsus IV came from jedibuttercup's No Compromises; both ideas used with permission, links available at sticksnstrings.


End file.
